Top-level leadership at CBS is saying that online videos are more of an …

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David Poltrack, chief research officer at CBS Corporation, has seen the light of other days, and now admits that there is a place in the media world for video downloads—even of clips that are CBS property.

The evidence for this is twofold. First, Poltrack took part in a panel discussion at the Future of Television Forum, where he said that there is no evidence to suggest that YouTube has harmed his company. "We're in a position right now where no one wants to take [content off YouTube]," he said. "When you have something the public really wants, the economic value in that is to come up with a way to satisfy the rights holders and serve the consumers. If [consumers] are going to steal it, give it to them anyway. But also make it easier to access and present it better than YouTube or BitTorrent or anywhere else."

Meanwhile, CBS conducted a poll on online viewing habits and found out that at least half of those online views were of shows the user had never seen on television, and often became a new fan of the show. That suggests that Internet video services are expanding the networks' audience rather than cannibalizing it, while giving existing audiences an additional medium in which to find shows they missed.

"We're looking at this as a key change in direction for us now and looking at our programming as dual distribution programming—over the air and on the Internet," Pollack said. Taken together, these two statements show that CBS has woken up to the market reality that piracy is nothing more than another form of competition, and should be fought with the same means CBS or any other network would use against its traditional rivals.

Convenience is king, and you gotta have great content—or at least watchable—and when you give Web users a legal, convenient and usable way to watch the shows they love online, it doesn't hurt the service's viability to insert a few ads and make money from that new channel. Disney's ABC saw it first, or at least was the first network to come out and say so, and now CBS is doing the same. It can't be long before Fox and NBC do the same, and from there it's not a huge leap to think that the same companies' feature film studios may follow.